The Twenty-Fourth Dynasty of Josh
28 March - 7 April 2025
Contents
Ascension Address
Ascension Address: Unequal Rights
“An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.” —Plutarch
“Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are.” —Benjamin Franklin
“The only thing that makes life unfair is the delusion that it should be fair.” —Steve Maraboli
“Nomic is a game in which changing the rules is a move. In that respect it differs from almost every other game. The primary activity of Nomic is proposing changes in the rules, debating the wisdom of changing them in that way, voting on the changes, deciding what can and cannot be done afterwards, and doing it. Even this core of the game, of course, can be changed.” —Peter Suber
Change the term Seeker to Nomicer and the term Custodian to Imperator, wherever they appear in the ruleset. Repeal all dynastic rules. Activate the following Building Blocks: Bounties, Reinitialisation, Precondition Unidling. Change the Gamestate Tracking page to the SNDT page in the wiki.
Imperial styles… Provocateur. Libertarian. Powerhouse. Scam-Neutral. Oblivious. Wildcard. Very happy to take on private tracking and mechanically important roles as needed.
Players
The following players were active in the early game: ais523, Darknight, DoomedIdeas, JonathanDark, Josh, Kevan, Raven1207
Gameplay summary
Each player has a single "Equity" score which is increased by certain Nomic and gameplay actions, and which can be reduced tit-for-tat between players.
A player may (having attained a certain minimum level of Equity) calling a 48-hour endgame period, which reduces some available actions, and after which the dynasty ends with a random winner chosen based on Equity scores.
Final Ruleset
Gamestate
Posts of Interest
- Stepping In To Assist (Josh / SingularByte) - Established the core mechanic of the dynasty, that all players had a single visible statistic that represented their share of a victory that could be rolled for at any time, once a certain threshold had been met. The first draft of this was an immediate victim of the restriction on proposal edits and had to be resubmitted.
- First Steps (Josh) - Put some basic actions for gaining Equity in place, including a flat reward for all Proposals, regardless of whether they passed or failed (but providing that the Imperator did not consider them to be valueless proposals put through solely to generate a reward).
- Instead Of Edits (ais523) - With the edit window removed for the dynasty, a system for speedy failure and re-proposal was put into place. This mechanic was later promoted to a Back To The Drawing Board Building Block.
- Six Shots Or Only Five (Kevan) - Sneaking in just before a prohibition on new tracked variables came into effect, this turned the game's "three times per week" and "three times per dynasty" actions into tracked white and red tokens.
- Thou Shalt Not Zipfile (Kevan) - Certain words became Sins.
- You Rung (Josh) - Chains of proposals using the same words could be used to score, son long as the words in question were not Sins.
- Variable Rewards (ais523) - Introduced a degree of modularity to the rewards available to players for their actions.
- Bounty Notice Equity Laundering (Josh) - Raised a bounty for laundry list fixes. This bounty was successfully claimed by Kevan and JonathanDark.
- Announcement Of Attainment: A Lacuna (ais523) - Lacuna was triggered, moving the dynasty into its endgame.
Lacustrine Cities(Josh) - Offered a mechanic by which Lacuna could be exited; declined.- Late Arrivals At The Nomicers Ball (Kevan) and Late Re-Arrivals At The Nomicers Ball (ais523) - Placed limits on unidling and reinitialising players from participating in the roll-off, in a way that turned out to be important.
- Roll Off and That Isn't What "Heuristic" Means (ais523) - The first attempt to end the dynasty. Found to have been illegal due to wording irregularities in the rule.
- Lacunexit (Josh) and Lacunexit Enactment Post (JonathanDark) - The second attempt. Discredited after the proposal was found to have been illegally edited, a finding that was upheld in a CfJ.
What We Meant Was...(JonathanDark) - A third attempt at a roll-off; failed.None Of This(SingularByte) - A fourth attempt at a roll-off; failed.- The Dice Chose Me Twice (ais523) - ais523 argued that they deserved the win due to having won two roll-offs and having been dispossessed on technicalities. The discrediting of Lacunexit proved fatal for this argument.
Secure Beneath The Watchful Eyesand The Eyes Have It (Josh) - Attempted to resolve the dynasty by having the Emperor select, semi-objectively, a merit winner. The winner so selected in The Most Meritous Nomicer Is was Kevan.Play Ball(Zack) - A concurrent proposal with The Eyes Have It which argued for re-opening the game and playing on. Popular, but less popular than Eyes, so vetoed to avoid a confused gamestate.
Non-Dynastic Changes
The proposal incentives in this dynasty resulted in a lot of non-dynastic changes being proposed and voted through.
- Vote Counter Live On The Blog (Zack) - The long-running vote counter script was updated and integrated into the stylesheet of the blog.
- Making Failure Less Painful (SingularByte) - The shut-out period for failed DoVs was reduced to 3 days from 5.
Objective CfJs and DoVs(ais523) - An attempt was made to remove subjectivity from CfJs and DoVs.Driving Engagement(JonathanDark) - An attempt was made to require a certain level of posting to avoid being made idle. This failed but on a REVISE vote; a second draft later failed.- Your Call Is Very Important To Us (Kevan) - Clarified the distinction between Precondition Unidling and Recusants.
- False Until Proven True (JonathanDark) - Added a true/false default to Numbers and Varables.
The Emperor's New Style(ais523) - Attempted to make Imperial Styles no longer gamestate- Brick Cloner (Josh) - Make changes to Building Blocks automatically propagate to the Building Blocks page
- Twelve Hours Are Not Enough (ais523) - The minimum voting window for proposals was extended to 24 hours
A Rose By Any Other Fair Play Violation(Josh) - Attempted to make the obfuscation of names with rulestext a Fair Play violation; it was passing at timeout, but required DEFERENTIAL votes to be enacted, and when a DoV caused a change of Emperor, those DEFERENTIAL votes were re-evaluated as AGAINST
Ascension
ais523 put the game into its endgame Lacuna state after only a week of play, believing that he had a scam that would deliver him the dynasty. The scam was found not to work and the subsequent DoV failed, but a majority believed that ais' Lacuna should be respected so the game continued to push forward towards some kind of resolution.
One attempt to do this was Lacunexit, a proposal that set about to directly apply the roll-off to the gamestate; voters had noted that Raven and Darknight (who had taken little or no part in the dynasty so far) could reinitialise to recover from their negative score, but it was expected that they wouldn't. At this point, Idle players Zack and Clucky noticed that they could join the dynasty for a free share of the victory; they also persuaded Darknight and Raven to reinitialise. Clucky (who assumed that the "roll off" that was happening was a sign that the dynasty had failed, rather than being the goal of the dynasty from the start) then proactively sought to persuade others to get in on the "winshare chaos", successfully persuading idle player Lulu to join them, and talking them through what they had to do.
This resulted in a sharply negative reaction from some of the other active players (some of whom had missed all this by being asleep), and led to Lacunexit being found to be illegal, with the suggestion that the interpretation that led to that finding having been motivated by a desire to prevent the unidling and reinitialising players from participating in the endgame. In the end, the decision was made to allow the Emperor to make a semi-objective selection of the most Meritous player - with the criteria skewed slightly towards the longer-term players than the new arrivals - which resulted in Kevan being selected. Their DoV was enacted unanimously.
